By Tardsie

The Gunslinger Sleeps With One Eye Open, Forever Waiting For The Younger Man With A Faster Gun He Knows Must Someday Come For Him.

I drank a lot when I was younger. Too much, I guess. I enjoyed the consciousness-altering aspect of booze, and for a while, there was a novelty to getting fucked-up. When, as is the nature of novelty, it wore off, I found I didn’t drink so much anymore.

Some years later, it turned out that a co-worker of mine, John, was acquainted with some of my old college friends. My college friends regaled John with only the most debauched and asinine of my collegiate exploits. It was a somewhat incomplete picture of the person I had been as a youngster, and about a million miles from the reality of my life at that moment. Based largely on this erroneous image, John challenged me to a drinking contest at an upcoming office party.

A drinking contest? The idea was a loser from the get-go. I had largely put my boozing behind me, but John had kept himself in fighting trim. This was a bet I was almost certain to lose.

It’s Hard To Pinpoint Any One Particular Reason I Stopped Drinking So Much.

Faced with this challenge today, I would have no problem begging off, using my lameness and general decrepitude as an excuse. But at twenty-five or so, I was still very much in the throes of a delayed adolescence, and my carefully crafted self-image would not allow me to ignore this challenge from a younger, stronger, faster predator. Moreover, I would have to go beyond merely showing up for John’s challenge; I could not simply shuffle complacently to my own ass-whipping. Not only did I have no choice but to accept, I had to win.

To assist me in this endeavor, I had a card up my sleeve worth a dozen battle-hardened livers, an advantage so pronounced as to change the course of battle even before the sound of the first shot: my exemplary cunning. John believed that the drinking contest would begin–and thus be won or lost–when we first took up our glasses. He was wrong.

“All right,” I said, showing him my game face, “Let’s do it. But I don’t want to pussy around, dude–if we’re gonna do this, let’s do it right: we’ll drink Jäger.”

Jäger Has Made My Life Immeasurably Richer Simply By Being In It, And I Don’t Care Who Knows It.

For those unfamiliar with the cough syrup-meets-black licorice charm of Jägermeister, the iconic kraut tipple is made from a variety of spices and despite being only 70 proof, has fostered a reputation for fucking your shit up. People spoke of Jäger in the breathless, quasi-mystic tones normally reserved for absinthe and peyote. Some people said it contained traces of deer blood, others opium. For whatever reason, I’ve never had a problem with Jäger, and consider its fearsome reputation to be entirely overblown.

But that reputation had precisely the effect I’d intended. Having proposed the wager, John could hardly refuse. He agreed, but with markedly less enthusiasm than when he first suggested it. Jägermeister it would be.

I Heard About A Dude Who Named His Child–HIS CHILD!–“Jäger Meier.” Some People Should Not Be Allowed To Have Children.

The party was at a co-worker’s house, and being a work-related party, both John and I agreed not to start our competition until later in the evening when the more reputable guests had left. John and I went to the keg together and filled our cups. Although John and I both returned to the keg several times that evening, I was nursing my beer and “filling” it when it was already nearly full. John, however, appeared to be drinking with abandon.

When it was time to throw down in our liquor-based contest of manhood—well, I guess you already know that I kicked his ass. It wasn’t even close. When I left the party, John was on hands & knees in the front lawn, heaving a black and hideous mess into the grass. I gave his shoulder a squeeze and said some comforting but ultimately condescending words as I passed. I kept my dignity all the while, and waited at least until I was in the car before I began convulsively to spew, coating the door and good portion of the seat. Happily for everyone, it was my girlfriend’s car.

***

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

By Tardsie

I Don’t Normally Go For Broken Girls, But Heather Was A Special Kind Of Broken.

I met a girl named Heather once at a party many years ago, back when I was single. High summer had come to Western Washington: long, pleasant days finally ushered into night by an extended twilight. Barbecuing weather. The perfect day for a house party.

Heather was a friend of a friend, and she was lovely. She was brainy and self-assured, funny in that easy way that wasn’t practiced, but was as much a natural component of her makeup as were her eyes, nose, lips or breasts. And she was cool, having mastered the delicate feat of managing to remain feminine while at the same time laughing at crude jokes and dropping the occasional F-Bomb.

I am not one of those guys for whom women go nuts at first sight. I guess I’ve been lucky in love, but all my serious relationships have been with women whom I’d known for a while before we started dating, ladies who were slow to recognize that they were already madly in love with me. Like arsenic, my appeal works stealthily over time, growing in secret until it overwhelms the system’s natural defenses, and the victim ultimately succumbs. But this time, maybe, I got lucky–Heather seemed as into me as I was her–an assessment, I hasten to add, made before alcohol clouded my judgement, rendering all such judgments moot.

Some People Call Me The Rat-Killer Of Love.

We both made our individual rounds at the party, but it was never long before we’d find ourselves together again. Being tipsy only seemed to accentuate Heather’s wit and to embolden this already-bold girl. She was knocking the drinks back pretty fast, but so were a lot of people.

Heather grew increasingly hammered as the evening wore on. At 9:30 she was a funny drunk, flirtatious and playfully argumentative. But by the time 11:30 rolled around, she was a mess–an incoherent, apologetic, stumbling grotesquery. Where she had earlier been outgoing and vivacious, now she was quiet and uncertain, confused. Once, she slipped while descending a short, carpeted staircase, picking herself up at the bottom with a shaky little laugh that had nothing of mirth in it whatsoever.

Heather’s friends seemed to find this behavior funny, and when Heather shattered a beer bottle on the back patio a little after midnight, the ensuing beat of silence was followed closely by raucous laughter. “There goes Heather!” somebody said to more laughs.

I’m Afraid The Appeal Is Lost On Me.

“She’s like this every weekend,” my friend told me, explaining that, during the week, Heather worked a 9 to 5 job which helped to keep her behavior in check, but she really let loose on the weekends. She would spend her Friday and Saturday evenings bombed into incoherence. She suffered through Saturday and Sunday afternoons semi-comatose on her couch, the curtains drawn against the sun’s rays, and against the pain and nausea they brought.

As people made their goodbyes and the party thinned out, the predators began to circle around Heather, drawn to the scent of compromised vulnerability which was coming off her in waves. She was almost the last girl at the party.

One of the vultures, a guy I knew by face, was particularly determined. He’d moved into Heather’s orbit in the hour before the party wound down, halfheartedly attempting clumsy conversational overtures that often as not degenerated into innuendo, all the while moving steadily closer to Heather, his intentions naked on his face. Finally, he was behind her, rubbing her shoulders and murmuring banalities in her ear. He was nervous and twitchy; he smiled too much and he smiled wrong, as if worried some other predator might steal “his” kill out from under him.

True Story: I Ran Into The Creepy Guy Again A Few Years Later. He Tried To Get Me To Invest In A Multi-Level Marketing Scheme.

Abruptly, Heather turned to me and said, “Take me home.” Her face was plaintive; her eyes huge and terrified.

“Okay,” I said, “I can do that.”

The creep’s fingers froze and slowly retracted from their perch on either side of Heather’s neck. His face wore a look of thwarted, impotent shock that made it clear he had misunderstood what Heather wanted of me. She wasn’t asking me to take her home so that I could have sex with her; she just wanted to go home.

Even with her diminished capacity, Heather must have been aware to some degree of the risks involved in placing her safety in the hands of a man she’d only that day met, and how quickly that situation could spiral beyond her control. Apparently, she thought her chances alone in a car with me were better than if she stayed here with her friends, enjoying the attentions of the creep. I flatter myself that Heather chose the way she did because the spark between us I had imagined earlier in the evening when we were both sober had been very real, and that the events of that years-ago evening are properly filed among life’s many great “if only” moments.

In the end, the thing that I’d wanted more than anything just six or seven hours earlier came to pass–I got to take Heather home. She gave me her phone number before she got out of the car, and said I should call her some time. I told her I would, wishing I could stop the lie even as it came tumbling from my lips.

By Tardsie

I Have Always Believed Learning To Be A Life-Long Process.

Part The Last: In which we finally stop talking for a while.

After finishing my class-prep in the parking lot of a McDonald’s, I arrived for my 9:00 AM Drug School appointment with ten minutes to spare. I wanted this experience to run smoothly, and to antagonize the DS faculty by being late would only serve to put the relationship on a bad footing from the start. Despite these precautions and my generally optimistic nature, it was hard to believe that this experience would turn out any better than had my previous brushes with counseling. As it happens, I got lucky.

Except For Not Being A Nerdy White Dude With Glasses, She Was Exactly Like This.

I’d signed up for a private class, and after filling out a few forms was shown to a conference room where the instructor awaited me on the opposite side of a small table adorned with a fantail of legal documents, reference materials and drug quizzes. Carmen was a black woman in her early fifties, with a tailored suit that softened her heroic contours. She was not fat precisely, but possessed of a certain bigness which spoke to neither poor health nor indolence, and was simply formidable.

I told Carmen the circumstances which had brought me to Drug School, and she asked me what I thought about being there. I told her, “I know you probably hear this from almost everybody who comes through this program, but I don’t really think I need to be here.” She agreed that she did hear that a lot, and encouraged me to expound on what I’d said.

“I think it’s bullshit,” I said, explaining that for all their incompetent zeal, this was the best result the prosecution could muster, and sending me to Drug School was more an act of spite than honest concern for my welfare. Careful not to get off on the wrong foot, however, I added, “But I don’t mean to disrespect you.”

Carmen managed to look amused. “You don’t have the power to disrespect me,” she said. “Nobody can disrespect me unless I let them.” I was starting to really like this woman.

OH, I HEARD THAT!

One of the first questions she asked was about my drug and alcohol history, and about my current behavior. Although weed was the only bad behavior to which I’d have to confess at that time, I was worried that some of my past experiences would complicate matters. In addition to some heavy alcohol use in my late teens and a fondness sometime later for psychedelics, there were a few chemical enhancements that I’d tried once or twice which I feared were sufficiently heinous to set off her substance abuse warning system.

On the other hand, I knew that only by being honest would I derive any benefit from this experience, so I told her everything. When I was done, she said something that let me know she was a cut above the “professionals” to whom I’d previously spoken.

“Well,” she said, her voice slow and neutral, “From what I’m hearing, it sounds like you smoke too much marijuana.”

Seriously, How Difficult Was That? It Just Seemed Pretty Obvious From This End.

We did have one sticking point. “I’m confused,” she said, flipping through her files until she located my drug evaluation from Pee-Testers International. She looked up and gave me a hard stare, “Your evaluation indicates that you’re drug free, but from what you’re telling me, that’s not the case at all.”

I smiled. “I wasn’t as forthcoming with them as I have been with you.”

“I see,” she said, her face inscrutable and unsmiling.

But I Never Lied To You.

Exceeding even my wildest expectations, Drug School was done by 11:30. In fairness to both Carmen and the program, we covered a lot of material and I took several quizzes. I’m a fast test-taker, and it also helps to remember that the curriculum is hardly designed for Rhodes Scholars. Carmen and I talked quite a bit. She was informative, kind and frank.

“I want to thank you for creating an environment in which I could be honest,”¹ I told her. “I could have jobbed this, you know.”

She gave me my DS diploma and court certificate, and offered me a final piece of advice. “Listen,” she said, hesitant for the first and only time in our short acquaintance, “You probably didn’t really need to be here, but I want to make it clear to you that you smoke too much marijuana. It’s not good for your lungs.”

“I’ve started using a vaporizer,” I told her truthfully.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s much better for you.”

Seriously, Lady–My Body Is A Temple.

So kids, I’m hardly a role model. These things that I’ve done–please don’t do them. Not unless you want to be hella awesome like me. In the coda to this already-bloated series, Untruth & Consequences: Debriefing,² I’ll attempt to find a moral in these sordid episodes.

¹”B.S. Who talks like that?” I do–that’s an exact quote. The way I talk and the way I write are so very often misconstrued as ridiculously grandiloquent affectations. In fact, that’s just how God made me. Elderly ladies find it quite charming, in case you’d like to know. ∞ T.

By Tardsie

The Potential To Be An Asshole Is Always There, But Whiskey Helps You Put It To Best Use. That’s Permanent Marker, By The Way.

Part 3 of 4: In which are observed new symptoms to the same regrettable behavior, a bottom is briefly reached, and alcohol is revealed to be the author of all my woes.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the first two installments in this exciting series, Don’t Forget To Hurt and So Much Love To Share. If you miss them, you’ll also miss out on your 72 black-eyed virgins in heaven, so there’s that to think about.

My second experience with counselling was no better than the first, but at least was under somewhat different circumstances–this time I really was on drugs.

Also, it was my idea. Sort of.

In a successful bid to be readmitted to college after my expulsion,¹ I undertook a series of actions to demonstrate that I had once and for all forsaken my libertine ways: I went to Alcoholics Anonymous a couple of times, where I gained a respect for the venerable organization, if not a desire to become a part of it; I placed an ongoing ad in my college’s paper advertising the school’s counselling service (a meaningless gesture which claimed the lives of a great many trees, but was nonetheless wholeheartedly applauded by the administration); and visited a substance abuse counselor–a very bad one as it turns out.

Yeah, I Had To Suck A Lot Of Dick To Get Back Into School.

When I came to the counselor I had reached a point where I was the most receptive to substance abuse treatment I have been either before or since. Ironically, in our short time together, this earnest acceptance was about the only thing in me she managed to fix. I arrived a humble, chastened man, ready to open up to the therapist about my chemical intake so that I could get the help I was beginning to believe I so desperately needed. I told her the story of getting kicked out of school, and of the behaviors which had led to it. I was forthcoming about my increasingly heavy use of psychoactive drugs, and didn’t varnish the truth, even when it was uncomfortable.

When I was done, she surprised me by saying, “Well, I think it’s clear that you have a real problem with alcohol.”

Like It Apparently Helped Her Forget That I Was Smoking A Shitload Of Weed.

Although it’s true that I consumed a copious amount of alcohol in my early college years, it had tailed off substantially, and hadn’t played a significant role in my problems with the administration nor contributed meaningfully to my expulsion. Helpfully, I said, “Well, yeah…But, you know–I really think I might have more of a problem with marijuana these days.”

Some of the air seemed to fly from the room. She regarded me as a few frozen seconds ticked by. “The underlying problem is your alcoholism,” she said, her words deliberate and painted with a fatalistic urgency, “And that’s what we have to address first.”

It’s When You’re Just A Little Bit Inclined Toward A Certain Notion Or Ideology.

A little more cautiously, I said, “Well, it’s just that I don’t drink very much any more, and I smoke marijuana pretty much every day, so…”

“It’s alcohol,”² she said, making it clear that not only was the issue closed for discussion, but that I had made an enemy. I saw her once or twice more and talked about my alcoholism. As with my previous experience, it seemed like the best thing for everybody would be for me to just stop going.

It’s Like I Tell My Kids–Being Honest Never Did Anybody Any Good.

However, writing this series has given me an opportunity to reexamine these events in my life beyond the degree to which I have already explored them. As such, I conducted a statistical analysis of my current alcohol and marijuana intake to see how the therapist’s theory plays out over the long run.

Over the past 30 days I’ve had 3 glasses of wine (2 at Killers Concert in Las Vegas 12.28.12, 1 on New Year’s Eve) at 5 ounces each for 15 ounces total, and 1.5 beers (1 beer on New Year’s Eve, split beer with brother-in-law on New Year’s Day) at 12 ounces each for 18 ounces total. Taken altogether, I’ve consumed 33 ounces of alcohol in the last month. Although I can’t peg my marijuana intake with that same accuracy, it can safely be claimed that I’ve consumed no more than 8 ounces of the reefer, less than a quarter of my alcohol consumption during that same period. Statistics don’t lie.

An Alcoholic Never Knows When He’ll Slip. Will My Next Drink Come In Two Weeks At A Super Bowl Party Or Two Months From Now? Sometime In Between? You Think About It, I’ll Smoke A Bowl.

In the final installment, I’m sent to someone who does me a little good. Be sure to join us when we revisit DRUG SCHOOL!

¹The expulsion was for LSD, a decidedly non-addictive hallucinogen that turns your brain into an eight-hour laser-light show. This fact becomes significant in light of the silliness which follows. ∞ T.

²And in hindsight, okay–yeah, I see what she was trying to say. I simply substituted an addiction to alcohol for one to the sweet, sweet cheeba, and that while there are superficial differences in the symptoms, the underlying sickness remains the same. While I don’t accept that as an absolute, I do recognize some truth in it. However, that knowledge was hard-won through years of living, so I’m not sure what was accomplished by the therapist going full OmegaBitch on me right out of the gate like that. A valid observation does fuck all good for anybody when it’s wielded like an ax. ∞ T.

By Smaktakula

Attention idiots: you may be threatening the wrong Casey Anthony.

It's Totally Okay To Hate Her. It Feels Pretty Good, Doesn't It?

The public is pretty upset about last week’s jury decision clearing accused child-murderess Casey Anthony of all but the most minor charges. Most people find an appropriate outlet for this rage, such as Facebook status updates or in the Lethe-like powers of alcohol. Some, however, express their animus through inappropriate displays like death threats.

Sadly, all those death threats don’t always find their intended targets. As it turns out, that there are one or two other Casey Anthonys running around out there. One of these is Casey Anthony of Darby, Pennsylvania, who has recently been receiving death threats from well-meaning, but moronic members of the public. This Casey Anthony, if people had bothered to check, is a dude–a goateed, bald black dude, who in fact bears only a passing resemblance to the clean-shaven, fully folliculate, infanticidal white chick.

Look, Color-Blindness And Gender Neutrality Have Their Place, But Don't Be An Idiot.

To make matters worse for ‘Good’ Casey, he’s not the only member of his family to have the name. It turns out that two of his sons are also named Casey Anthony.

By Smaktakula

Cretinous tabloid headline Charlie Sheen is heading back to rehab at the court’s insistence. Sheen is to spend thirty days at a rehabilitation facility, followed by thirty days of probation. This makes it a full sixty days before he can go on a bender or backhand the woman he loves without automatically going back to jail.

Jenny Was Playing So Well, Too. It Was Such A Shame That She Had To Hit Herself In The Face With Her Racquet Five Times.

Sheen is reportedly eager to serve out his time and get clean. Following that, it’s expected he’ll return to doing what he does best: intoning shitty material that wouldn’t even be recognizable as an attempt at humor without the Pavlovian laugh track to squeeze some chuckles from the mouth-breathing audience.

His best shot at continued success is to stick to a simple formula: Don’t hit the bottle, don’t hit the wife.

Sheen, Seen Here At A White Power Rally, Has Shed Every Last Vestige Of The Human Being Named Carlos Estevez.